USpolitics

‘Unsettling and unprecedented’: Washington DC mayor responds to Trump’s federal takeover of city police

wtaf

This tyrannical white supremacist landscape is erasing our sense of existence and meaning. Daily forms of rebellion birth us back into our bodies and our purpose. Non-compliance is art, as art is meant to defy the status quo, question the givens, expand the boundaries of knowing and freedom. And as you courageously make your mark of refusal, you carve a path for others to be brave. Non-compliance is praxis, stretching and transforming the muscles of our discontent into impactful and embodied action.

There are a multitude of ways that we can make their lives miserable by taking small risks and huge ones. Like folks in California sitting in their cars outside the hotels where the Ice agents are and just lying on their horn for hours. Or people towing Ice vans away that are parked illegally. Or the Harlem baseball coach who knew all his kids were American-born. When Ice invaded the field, he told his kids to get inside the batting cage and stay silent. He said he was willing to die for his kids to get home.

”And non-complying is also filling in the gaps of resources and care that they are taking away. They’re already closing rural hospitals where we live because our governor didn’t expand Medicaid,” Ash-Lee told me. “So residents must build an alternative like country people and black folks across the country have been doing on their own accord for decades, if not centuries, creating community spaces where we can both line dance, do some boots-on-the-ground organizing, get your blood pressure checked, get your mammogram in the mobile unit, get your teeth cleaned, whatever. All of those things are not complying.”

The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson—probably the worst speaker in American history—shut down the House early this week before its five-week vacation. He wants to avoid holding votes on releasing the Epstein files that reportedly include, among other notables, President Donald J. Trump.

This is the latest valet service provided by a spineless Johnson, a Trump toady, whose groveling has no known boundaries. Imagine Johnson, a lawyer, took an oath to uphold the Constitution yet has no interest in safeguarding the independence of the congressional branch of our government.

Gaza is on the brink of running out of the specialised therapeutic food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children, United Nations and humanitarian agencies say.

”We are now facing a dire situation, that we are running out of therapeutic supplies,” Salim Oweis, a spokesperson for Unicef in Amman, Jordan, told Reuters on Thursday, saying supplies of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a crucial treatment, would be depleted by mid-August if nothing changed.

”That’s really dangerous for children as they face hunger and malnutrition at the moment,” he added.

Oweis said Unicef had only enough RUTF left to treat 3,000 children. In the first two weeks of July alone, Unicef treated 5,000 children facing acute malnutrition in Gaza.

Nutrient-dense, high-calorie RUTF supplies, such as high-energy biscuits and peanut paste enriched with milk powder, are critical for treating severe malnutrition.

”Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,” a World Health Organization spokesperson said on Thursday.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/30899080

The capital letters imply "1488" and the post is 14 words long, both of which are well-known nazi dog whistles.

Fascism Is Tacky:

The administration that populates its Instagram feed with AI-generated images of eagles, money, and the DJT Jerk Off Dance just withdrew from UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency. This is the second time in as many terms that Trump has pulled us out of the organization. In a comment to the New York Times, a State Department spokesperson accused UNESCO of promoting “divisive social and cultural causes” (Palestinians’ right to exist, mostly) and maintaining an “outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda” at odds “with our America First foreign policy.” Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House after Melania.

Though not mentioned by Times, the selection of “Deportee” is highlighted in a Rolling Stone headline as “an Ode to Deported Workers, [That] Has Never Been More Relevant.” On multiple levels, the haunting words and tones of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” have even more resonance today.

For a nation of immigrants—none of us are native, save Indigenous peoples—immigration has long been controversial, especially of those less desired due to race or ethnicity, other than enslaved people dragged in by chains. Restrictive immigration laws date to as early as a 1790 act which required immigrants to be “free white persons.” Similar racist intent characterized the notorious 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which gave special preference to white immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.

But the nation has also long depended on the hard labor—from the fields to transcontinental railroads to garment factories, construction, and meat processing plants of today—of immigrants of color who could be exploited with low wages, harsh living conditions, and coercive threats of deportation.

Unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and his fellow immigrant haters have adopted the most racist and militaristic practices of the past, and the same disregard to who is rounded up. They have escalated the mass deportations to new depths, flagrantly flaunting court orders, with masked secret agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people and terrorizing immigrants and communities of color.

It’s not just that he really, really wants this scandal to go away since it has been turning swaths of his normally cult-like base against him.

No, there’s another element – and a brutal one for the president. It’s where the story was published: in the Wall Street Journal, whose conservative opinion side has often backed him and whose news side has a reputation for ensuring that explosive stories are bulletproof: accurate in their facts and fully prepared to stand up under legal scrutiny.

After summer comes to an end, and voters start paying attention to what was actually in it and what is about to be done to them. Maureen Comey, the prosecutor in the Gillane-Maxwell trial, and who helped the Southern District of New York prepare the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein, was fired on Wednesday by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Maureen Comey is the daughter of FBI Director James Comey, who Trump fired back in 2017, after Comey refused to stop looking into Russiagate.

The New York Times reporting that Maureen Comey was fired late Wednesday night in a short letter that said her firing was based on powers granted to the president in Article 2 of the Constitution. I believe it's the Payback Clause. Trump is a strong believer in paying people back, unless it's what he owes on his bill.

The Times also reporting that Trump is now claiming the Epstein files, which Pam Bondi refuses to release, were written by Democrats, including chief among them, James Comey, in order to embarrass Donald Trump. But James Comey is, or at least was, a Republican.

The Trump administration is lying about Social Security. Elon Musk’s DOGE has infiltrated the Social Security Administration (SSA). The agency’s new commissioner, Wall Street billionaire Frank Bisignano, calls himself “a DOGE person.” His top lieutenants include long-time Musk associates Antonio Gracias and Aram Moghaddassi.

After infiltrating Social Security, the DOGE crew forced out thousands of civil servants, including top leaders with decades of institutional knowledge. No problem, they thought. We’ll replace them with 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine and an AI chatbot.

First, Kyle Kulinski for a wrap up of the week’s news including the podcast manosphere’s turning on Trump over the Epstein client list suppression. Then we are joined by Benjamin P. Dixon aka Pastor Ben, Andrea Rovenski, and Matt Strackbein aka The Letterhack who are promoting thisspace.tv. This Space is a new working-class media collective.

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by burning fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil”, he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts – if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

A network of former intelligence, military, and national security officials on Tuesday launched the Profiles in Cowardice Award and urged the public to vote for nominees who are "silent in the face of the country's descent into fascism," a march led by U.S. President Donald Trump.

"We are in a constitutional crisis," says the Eisenhower Media Network's (EMN) website for the award. "Trump is amassing power in the executive branch, ignoring Congress and the courts. Meanwhile, leaders who have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution are sitting on their hands."

Nominees for the inaugural Profiles in Cowardice Award are former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), retired Gens. David Petraeus and Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Barbara Kingsolver points out that Trump’s “so-called Big Beautiful Bill” could be devastating for Appalachia, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. “The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.” Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? “Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don’t even know the answer to that,” she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will “come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that’s a depressing subject.”

DO SOMETHING on a local level for your community and your country. Take the time to register to vote and help others do the same, write postcards to government officials, create zines, and have a little catharsis with your fellow firework-hating neighbors. Organizers are inviting folks to “hang out among us, your local artists that support trans rights, immigrants, rights to protest, bodily autonomy, and all the good stuff.” Hell yeah, pals. That’s what I call America.

As a United States marine, Arturo Flores served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he worked as a military police officer and trained dogs to find roadside bombs.

It’s his experience in the military that has made what he’s seen on the streets of southern California in recent weeks all the more disturbing to him, Flores said.

Flores is the mayor of Huntington Park, in south LA county.

Like in other parts of LA, many Huntington residents have been terrified amid reports of masked federal agents detaining immigrants, or those that look like immigrants, on the street, in parking lots, at swap meets or large stores and soldiers deployed into the city against the wishes of local officials and the governor.

“It is a campaign of domestic terror that is being imposed on our residents on a daily basis,” Flores said. “It is a level of psychological warfare that I’ve only seen in theaters of war. It’s terrifying seeing it being displayed here in my city.”

As the legislative branch works their magic math to kill as many poor people as possible the judicial branch has been doing much of the same.

Elie Mystal joins us to break down last week’s slew of tragic rulings.

The GOP, which first lost command of the white vote in cities and, gradually, the suburbs, is in actuality the minority party. Without certain institutional (and therefore structural) advantages, the country should have long accepted the obvious fact of its multiculturalness and been organized by a politics that spanned from the likes of Joe Biden (conservative) to the likes of Mamdani (progressive).

The urban values supported by the Democratic Party should be regarded as conventional, as the usual, as the everyday. What must be registered as bizarre is not Mamdani, but Stephen Miller.

“A city we can afford.” Zohran’s slogan is unremarkably moderate and unabashedly progressive. In a city whose median income is rising sharply in spite of a 25% poverty rate, only the rich are comfortable, while everyone else, from students to firefighters to families with more than one kid struggle – or leave.

Asked by a local Fox TV interviewer what a democratic socialist is, Mamdani answered: “To me it means that every New Yorker has what they need to live a dignified life – it’s local government’s responsibility to provide that.” His platform includes a rent freeze on the city’s 2.3m regulated apartments; free childcare starting at six months; no-fare buses; and a $30 minimum wage – about the city’s living wage – by 2030. Basically, he believes life in the city can be easier and happier.

This platform resonates.

But getting rid of food dyes is probably still a good thing

“The big beautiful budget bill is now open for debate in the Senate after winning Saturday's procedural hurdle. Two more Republican moderates head for the exits. The messaging Democrats need to win the race for mayor of New York City gets even uglier.

Why throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid and food stamps is the Republican Party's latest iteration of voter suppression”

Police in southern California arrested a man suspected of posing as a federal immigration officer this week, the latest in a series of such arrests, as masked, plainclothes immigration agents are deployed nationwide to meet the Trump administration’s mass deportation targets.

The arrest is one of several cases involving people allegedly impersonating immigration officials, as the nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants intensifies.

Experts have warned that federal agents’ increased practice of masking while carrying out immigration raids and arrests makes it easier for imposters to pose as federal officers.

“Yes, I'm coming to you from New York City, where I was stunned to discover that the guy I voted for actually won. It looks like the world headquarters for capitalism may have actually elected Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist. Now, because the winner of Tuesday's election is Muslim, and he became a naturalized citizen just six years ago, that's the story of America, by the way, there already are calls from the right wing for Tom Homan, our nation's border czar, to deport him.”